Read: Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen ★★★ 📚
Viva who works for corrupt philanthropists & her Eccentric millionaire partner take on said philanthropists, corrupt politicians & MAGA activists to stupid for the proud boys. Heavy satire, fun but feels a bit forced.
Read: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan ★★★★ 📚
Say, forever. What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we've done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say "time and again" when something is bothering us and "it's time" when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.
I raced through the 440 pages absorbed in the characters & situations. American small town story over two wars, two or three generations. The cast all damaged by birth, those wars & circumstances.
Read: Misinterpretion by Ledis Xhoga ★★★ 📚
An Albanian interpreter gets into a lot of communication difficulties. Set in New York & Albania Constantly surprising narrative as the narrator bounces from one complex situation to another.
Just saw the notice about the rss.chat example inboundRss for wordpress . I must say I hadn’t thought about going that way. I had wondered about POSSE from WordPress to rss chat.
Currently micro.blog does a great job of posting items from my feed to mastodon and bluesky. I’ve also used FeedWordPress to pull rss feeds from one place to another.
Where inboundRSS differs is that it runs in a browser served from somewhere. The notes suggest it could site on a server or be served via node locally. I guess a simple php script could work too? inboundRss also updates edited items in real time (a few seconds).
I’ve run through the instructions, I had a bit of difficulty getting my site id, but got that from the WordPress.com API console using GET /me/sites/
Once I’d filled in the id and my demo.rss.chat feed I run the file with php -S localhost:8081
All I need today is do now is publish this post and it should also go onto my WordPress site. I’ll check that and then test editing here by adding a link…
And it worked: Testing inboundRSS
I’ve now made several edits and they are reflected on my site. I put the php snippet for the terminal in backticks, they stayed as backticks on demo.rss.chat but were converted to code tags on my site.
I am now wondering what happens to edits on the WordPress side? If I added categories & tags? Enough for now though. Lots to think about!
I’ve been following the development of rss.chat on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com for a while. Dave set up a limited example at chat.rss and now an open one at https://demo.rss.chat which I joined. There dosen’t seem to be a promise that this particular server will stay up, but it offers the chance to try and explore.
rss.chat is a social network:
- Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts.
- The whole community has an RSS feed.
- There is an OPML file that lists all the users.
You can subscribe to those feeds if you want.
Introducing rss.chat – daveverse
from the same page:
I envision a world of small communities, running on small servers. We haven’t released the code for this yet, but will, under an MIT license.
Which is interesting. I remember, when I started using micro.blog, one of my thoughts was that it was the perfect model for a small community with particular interests. At the time I was thinking of education. I love everything about micro.blog but I do not see many there with my interests in education. As I understand it, Dave has no intention in supporting all of micro.blog’s features. In fact I think he hopes that other people will used the spec and concept to create different things:
Don’t think of this as a product Rob. Think about features you want in other people’s products. Think of this as a source of feeds, not a destination for them.
https://demo.rss.chat/?id=108
This is a very interesting way to think about a new piece of software. There are also some interesting ideas on the github issues including mentions of webmentions and WordPress.
Read Heartwood by Amity Gaige ★★★★☆
Gripping search for a missing hiker on the Appalachian trail. Told from three points of view, the lost, the searcher and a seemingly disconnected elderly lady in a retirement complex. An enjoyable read.
Read Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside ★★★★★
Finally (and this seems less fanciful with each passing day) our inner spaces are being placed in jeopardy, as the providers of social media colonise and denature what use to be called the life of the mind for advertising revenues or political gain. Science fiction not so long ago, the enclosure of experience itself – not only of our consumer tastes, but also of our root desires, our dreams, our political leanings – has become commonplace. From habitat to place itself, from public to inner space, from freedom of speech to the chambers of our imagery?, everything is subject to enclosure, all too often by powers and principalities that we cannot even name.
and
This grief is all the more painful because it is shot through with a guilt from which no one is exempt. For, according to the accepted environmental / Climate Change narrative, we are obliged to accept that everyone is equally guilty, even though it always seems to be one small and shamelessly entitled group that profits most from the destruction.
What a wonderful book, 4 essays on morality & extinction. The Wind and the Willows, Thomas Hardy, poets & philosophers. Burnside touches upon a range of linked concerns from cave painting to covid always in depth if not at length.
Given the good weather there are quite a lot of butterflies around this week. This one looks like an old one that has been in the wars, black faded and very ragged. I wonder what tales it could tell. My butterfly by month page is building nicely.
Short walk to Greenside reservoir this morning. Warm, mostly sunny. Lots of butterflies around.
I’d guess I saw over 200 ringlets; a lot of painted ladies & meadow browns. A few common blues & red admirals ,one small tortoiseshell & a white of some sort. A few fritillaries bright orange and zooming around, never posing. I saw one I’d never seen before. It look to me, after consulting my book & the web, like a small skipper. According to the same research this doesn’t seem to be where they are expected? Unfortunately my camera threw an error while I was trying to get a different angle.
#Flora #BloomStrolling #BloomScrolling
